436: 41.08 Rich Fernandez - Positivity and Psychological Safety

NUGGET CONTEXT

Rich speaks about why we have a negativity bias as a default setting. He traces it back to human evolution and talks about the fact that for us to survive, it was critical to attach a higher weightage to negative signals in the environment than the positive ones. He links it to the criticality of ensuring psychological safety in a team (results of Project Aristotle in Google) to drive business performance.

GUEST

Rich Fernandez is the CEO of Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI). Prior to this he was a Director of Executive Education and People Development at Google.

SIYLI began as an initiative in Google in 2007 when a team of leading experts in mindfulness, neuroscience and emotional intelligence developed an internal course for fellow Googlers. It quickly became incredibly popular within Google and given the interest outside Google was so great, SIYLI was set up as an independent Not for Profit in 2012\. Since then SIYLI has become a globally recognised programme and continues to work with Google as well as other Corporate, Nonprofit and Government Organisations around the world.

In our conversation, we spoke about Rich’s take on Leadership Development in a “rocket ship” such as Google and talk about the distinction between performance and potential, something that several organizations mix up. We talk about the various types of attention (open, focused and meta-attention) that we need to cultivate and discuss how one could think about baking in a meditation habit. We also discuss other themes such as response flexibility versus reaction, meta-distress, building a positive mindset, 3 levels of resilience and more.

This conversation is likely to be of value to any leader (specifically in the tech world) who is at the cutting edge of disruption and innovation and is trying to build his/her leadership capability as he/she scales up the organisation.

Published in March 2019.

HOST

Deepak is a Leadership Advisor and an Executive Coach. He works with leaders to improve their effectiveness and in helping them make better decisions specifically around organizational and career transitions. He currently runs Transition Insight (www.transitioninsight.com) and works with leaders to handle phases of transition thoughtfully. He has worked as an Operations Consultant with KPMG in UK, Strategy Consultant with McKinsey in the US and as a Leadership Consultant with EgonZehnder (a Swiss Leadership Advisory firm) where he helped companies recruit CEOs, CXOs and Board Members and worked on Leadership Development. Deepak is a certified CEO Coach and is an alumnus of IIT Madras, IIM Ahmedabad and London Business School. His detailed profile can be found at https://in.linkedin.com/in/djayaraman

OTHER GUESTS

1.Vijay Amritraj 2.Amish Tripathi 3.Raghu Raman 4.Papa CJ 5.Kartik Hosanagar 6.Ravi Venkatesan 7.Abhijit Bhaduri 8.Viren Rasquinha 9.Prakash Iyer 10.Avnish Bajaj 11.Nandan Nilekani 12.Atul Kasbekar 13.Karthik Reddy 14.Pramath Sinha 15.Vedika Bhandarkar 16.Vinita Bali 17.Zia Mody 18.Rama Bijapurkar 19.Dheeraj Pandey 20.Anu Madgavkar 21.Vishy Anand 22\. Meher Pudumjee 23.KV Shridhar (Pops) 24.Suresh Naraynan 25.Devdutt Pattanaik 26.Jay Panda 27.Amit Chandra 28.Chandramouli Venkatesan 29.Roopa Kudva 30.Vinay Sitapati 31.Neera Nundy. 32.Deepa Malik 33.Bombay Jayashri. 34.Arun Maira 35.Ambi Parameswaran 36.OP Bhaat 37.Indranil Chakraborty 38.Tarun Khanna 39\. Ramachandra Guha 40\. Stewart Friedman

DISCLAIMER

All content and opinions expressed in the podcast are that of the guests and are not necessarily the opinions of Deepak Jayaraman and Transition Insight Private Limited. Views expressed in comments to blog are the personal opinions of the author of the comment. They do not necessarily reflect the views of The Company or the author of the blog. Participants are responsible for the content of their comments and all comments that are posted are in the public domai...